Time for Fundraisers to 'Shift & Reset'

The easy answers unfortunately are not the ones that are always going to solve the complex problems. There are some easy answers and some things that can be solved by, for example, being on Twitter. But the easy answers, if they're not going to solve the complex problems, it's no more helpful for me to offer them than anything else. So I get a lot people who still want specific answers to problems that I'm not even sure they can define.

I'm OK with that, and the reason I'm OK with that is because my role here, I think, is to get them thinking differently. If they're willing just in the slightest to say, "What do you mean there's no easy answer?" then hopefully when someone comes to them and says I've got a solution to our fundraising challenge and it's to be on Twitter, they're going to say, "Why?" They're going to at the very least ask the questions, and that, I have great confidence, is the first domino in the chain that will result in some real, measurable, meaningful shifts in how we operate and how we act.

Obviously the people who are more open to actual change, the more they go through the book and the more they hear from me and talk to me, we can get into more detail because there's a lot, all the way down to firing your staff or completely shaking up your org structure. Those are significant changes. That's not something to just nonchalantly be like, eh, fire your staff. But in some cases, the people you have are not qualified to meet the challenges that you have to meet today. That's not a criticism of those people; that's the reality of a changing world. We need to start recognizing that what we've been doing isn't working anymore, and if we start thinking differently a lot of other pieces are going to fall into place.